Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Ann Gets Voted Off The Island

by digby

Oh my goodness. Guess who’s being purged from the movement for not being a real conservative? From skralyx at Daily Kos:

I was just at RedState, though, and I got a strange breath of fresh air: a recommended diary over there tonight is about boycotting Ann Coulter. It got mixed comments, with some dittoheads bellowing, “I love Ann! I’m buying her book! Woohooo! Don’t bother me with facts and analysis. La la la! I can’t hear you!!”, but a nearly equal number agreeing that she is no service whatsoever to conservatism.

Redstate: I am somewhat reluctant to write about Ann Coulter this week. The last thing I want to do is help her sell more copies of her book. But I am willing to take that chance in order to denouce her, to show that she is one of the greatest dangers that exists to the conservative movement.

[…]

Captain Ed says it best about this:

…impugning the grief felt by 9/11 widows regardless of their politics is nothing short of despicable. It denies them their humanity and disregards the very public and horrific nature of their spouses’ deaths. The attacks motivated a lot of us to become more active in politics in order to make sure our voices contribute to the debate, and it is impossible to argue that the 9/11 widows (and widowers, and children, and parents) have less standing to opine on foreign policy than Ann Coulter…

Of course Ed isn’t the only conservative denoucing Coulter on this.

—–

Hugh Hewitt:

Ann Coulter owes an apology to the widows of 9/11, and she should issue it immediately. This is beyond callous, beyond any notion of decency. It is disgusting.

RedState:

this sort of savage attack on people who have suffered a horrible tragedy is beyond any excusing and, really, beyond any apology. Coulter, who was a friend of Barbara Olson (killed on the plane that hit the Pentagon), should know better; heck, any first-grader would know better. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

The Anchoress:

…she is embodying everything I currently cannot abide in the “conservative movement”, the arrogant presumption of absolute moral certitude (which is ugly, ugly, ugly coming from the left, so honey, it’s not pretty when it’s from the right, either), combined with the sense of over-confidence which is sending so many on the right into a self-destructive Roy Moore/Tom Tancredo plunge off a cliff.

Ace of Spades:

this nastiness is uncalled for. Even if something is actually felt deep inside — even if you’re filled with toxic hatred for very annoying, very presumptuous, very left-leaning women with an overweening sense of entitlement — most people would find less abrasive ways to express such an emotion. Does that mean that Ann is just more honest than us “nancy boys”? Not really. A lot of the time the excuse of “I was just being honest” is just a code for “I’m basically an inconsiderate [butthead] who cannot be bothered to modify my behavior in even the slightest fashion in order to observe basic conventions of social decency.”

The Strata-Sphere:

I don’t know what happened to Anne, but she is a walking disaster for conservatives…Anne Coulter is no Conservative. She cannot be. Either that or I am no conservative. There is no way to condone such cruelty. Anne, sit down and just don’t talk anymore. You have done enough damage.

—–

AJStrata is completely correct: Ann Coulter is no conservative. Ann Coulter stands for nothing more than herself. And this is the curious thing. Many conservative friends of mine are defending Coulter. Well, I think the joke is on them.

[…]

It is high time to “excommunicate” Ann Coulter from the conservative movement. So I am issuing this call to the conservative movement across the country: Boycott Ann Coulter! Do not buy her book. Do not attend her speaking engagements. My goal is to see her new book fall off the New York Times Top 10 Bestseller List very soon.

So if you are with me on this one please drop me a note in the comments below. And more importantly, get the word out. Pass this post on to others. It is high time to separate from Coulter just like we did with Pat Buchanan and David Duke.

Apparently commenters throughout the right blogosphere are aghast at this proposed purging of their blond heroine. They’d better get with the program. This is only the beginning.

Coulter has been a shrieking harpy for years, saying the most vile things imaginable and making a good profit at it. What in the world has changed?

They supported her when she said:

When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors.”

and this:

“[The] backbone of the Democratic Party [is a] typical fat, implacable welfare recipient”

and this:

“it’s far preferable to fight [terrorists] in the streets of Baghdad than in the streets of New York where the residents would immediately surrender.”

and this:

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”

or this:

“Liberals can’t just come out and say they want to take our money, kill babies and discriminate on the basis of race.”

and this:

“Name-calling has been the principal argument liberals have deployed against conservative arguments”.

Those quotes go back all the way to 1997 and they are just the tip of the iceberg. This woman has been coarsening the discourse with her hateful swill for more than a decade and made big bucks selling that swill to eager rightwing readers.

So what has precipitated this new wingnut sensitivity? Republican popularity, that’s what. That’s when the movement starts casting its dead weight overboard.

Sorry, Ann. That’s the way it goes in the conservative movement. When someone becomes a bother they are no longer conservative — no matter that you’ve spent your whole life doing exactly the same disgusting thing to great acclaim by all these people. You’ve been voted off the island. For the good of the Party. Long live conservatism — the “pure” ideology that never fails.

But guys, if you have a problem with Coulter’s attacks on the 9/11 widows, you’re going to have to take a look at the big guy himself. Ann Coulter didn’t create the slandering of the 9/11 widows theme. Limbaugh did. Is he no longer a conservative either?

Update: John Amato has posted a hilarious Coulter moment.

Update II: Howie Klein has another hilarious Coulter moment, by Henry Rollins.

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Can A Libertarian Find True Happiness In The Blues?

by tristero

My libertarian cyber-friend Mona has a very interesting guest post on the demonization of Michael Schiavo by the extreme right. From my standpoint there are several things that strike me as remarkable about it.

First of all is her underlying assumption that there is a controversy about this that needs to be addressed. In liberal and even centrist-right circles, the obscene behavior of the mainstream GOP during Schiavo- that’s correct, dear close-reading reader: “mainstream GOP” is today a synonym for the American far right – is simply accepted as fact (Joan Didion’s dismayingly bizarre dissent to this consensus is the only exception I know of, and there were extenuating circs for that which had nothing to do with Schiavo). In any event, knowing a little about Mona’s politics, it is not surprising she sides with the angels on this one.

Truly astonishing, imo, is that she seems open to exploring the possibility that her libertarian politics are closer to the modern Democratic Party than the Republican. And that brings up a host of very interesting questions that cluster around two axes: (1) Is the Democratic Party congenial to libertarianism?; (2) If so, is that a good thing for liberals?

(Full disclosure compels me to remind you of something I’ve mentioned several times in the past. I am a registered Independent and not a Democrat. In reality, I’ve never voted other than Democratic, Liberal Party, or Working Families Party – the candidates overlap quite often in New York. )

Let’s start with what Mona means by “libertarian.” In this post, she writes:

We libertarians are frequently caricatured as “Republicans who just want to smoke dope and have orgiastic sex.” Actually, we hold fealty to many serious general principles, including: the rule of law, basic human rights, federalism, and, yes, the individual adult’s liberty interest in making all manner of personal decisions sans interference from the state; we are also usually skeptical of moralistic social crusades.

A quick skim of this list reveals considerable agreement (agreeance? Calling the grammar police) with liberal values. With some serious caveats:

“Basic human rights” appears to be code for “affirmative action stinks.” I won’t rehearse the arguments pro/con affirmative action here other than to reassure readers that I fully support affirmative action (even if it produces the occasional Clarence Thomas) and don’t think American culture has changed enough vis a vis racism and poverty since the 60’s and 70’s to merit its abandonment – it can always be improved, however.

The point Mona is finessing here is, of course, not affirmative action per se but more general objections to the kind of social engineering liberals are often accused of advocating in their latte-addled interfering way. What libertarians fail to understand – and it is what makes me characterize libertarianism as utopian and naive – is that essentially *all* political action is social engineering.

Neither conservatives nor the extreme right – neither of which is naive – make that mistake, even if, for polemical reasons, they reframe what they’re up to as not social engineering. The argument between liberals, conservatives, and the extreme right revolves around what kind of social engineering is best. Tax breaks for corporations? Affirmative action? Coathangers? A strong FEMA? But the reality of government as social engineer is accepted as a given.

Libertarians were sold a bill of goods by Republicans. As all, repeat all, recent Republican history has shown, they are as much the party of Big Government as the Democrats. Before going blue, however, libertarians will need seriously to refine their notion of what government is. Make no mistake: Democrats do not loathe government. They recognize that there are some functions a government must do. And they are honest – unlike their red counterparts – about their belief that there are some things governments should do. Furthermore, Democrats are once again honest in asserting that there are some things governments do far better than private corporations or charities. (And it goes without saying there are many things the government should keep its filthy hands out of.)

The argument, within the party, is over the details and the relative balance. But the Norquistian notion of shrinking the US government so that it is so small it will slip down the drain (or whatever his odious metaphor was) is recognized as sheer idiocy or propaganda. The US government will change. It will not get substantially smaller. You can, God forbid, get rid of the NEA, but that just means that there will be more money going to fund bridges to nowhere in Alaska.

As long as Mona clings to the illusion that any human society can exist with “minimal” or no social engineering from the top, she will find politics among the blues majorly annoying.

Turning it around, from the standpoint of this liberal, “existential” arguments about social programs are a complete waste of time. Social Security is a good thing, Mona. Like any human institution, of course it can be improved and every liberal welcomes substantive discussions on how to do that. But eliminated? Privatized? That’s just social engineering John Birch-style. It’s not smaller government but, in the present day, a movement towards a rapacious authoritarianism. This liberal wants to…move on from such rightwing timewasters and address real issues, such as the construction of an affordable and just national healthcare system. There are serious, honest disagreements on how to do this. But I, for one, have zero interest in arguing whether it is creeping communism or not. I’ve seen communism up close; the charge that liberals advocating universal healthcare are a bunch of pseudo-commies is an outrageous canard that does not merit serious argument.

All of the above implies that federal taxes will have to be restored to rational levels to fund the workings of the US government. The fiscal irresponsibility exhibited by the rightwing whenever they obtain power is unconscionable. That plus the moral irresponsibility of deliberately shifting the tax burden to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor is criminal (maybe not legally, but certainly spiritually, by any serious standard including Christian and atheist value systems). Taxes will rise once the rightwing loses power. If paying your debts is a virtue, and it is, that is a Very Very Good Thing.

Potentially more troubling for the libertarian interested in the Democratic Party is Mona’s advocacy of federalism. I say “potentially” because I don’t know enough about what Mona herself means by the term. From what I can tell in a quick search, federalism is just States Rights rewritten as a polysyllable. And that is troubling.

Today, less than 40 years after the assasination of King, racism is still a shameful, omnipresent reality in the US (that it is true all over the world does not make it less shameful in the US, which has a terrible history of racism that adds a particular context). Liberals have a lot of problems with Katrina, for example; we believe the avoidable components of the disaster were permitted to happen due in large part to racism coupled with endemic corruption and incompetence. True, the Democratic Party does not, qua party, officially share this conviction, and Mona may find many Democrats who think racism had nothing to do with the awful images of human bodies floating in sewage. But it is hard to imagine that advocates of “federalism” will find many brothers and sisters in the party.

The issues centered around federalism are ancient ones in American history, as Sean Wilentz reminds us, in considerable detail, in his not-to-be-missed The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. Suffice it to say that arguments for “federalism” that depend upon chimera like “original intent” are, when you examine the history closely, exceedingly crude to the point of useless, except to advance partisan contemporary objectives. Original intent, as any fan of early music knows, is simply impossible to recover. It can be approximated to a greater or lesser extent, but there are always significant differences that make no performance “authentic.” Similarly attempts to base a modern political philosophy on slavish adherence to original intent are doomed to failure; such attempts represent a kind of secular fundamentalism, cherry-picking desired characteristics from a wide and contradictory canon of texts.

It goes without saying that there are useful arguments to be had about the intent of the Founders, the following generations, and their relevance today. It is the framing within the Procrustean bed of “original intent” that foreordains a conclusion that can only be illiberal. An argumentative structure that, as one of its givens, eliminates liberalism is not a structure I care to privilege with “engagement.” Ever.*

So in sum, Mona, you may find parts of the Democratic Party worldview congenial. But you will also find much that you won’t like; even if the Democrats, God forbid, move farther away from Enlightenment values, ie liberalism, broadly defined, it is hard to imagine the party advocating anything remotely close to libertarianism. From my standpoint, if the Democrats did so move, my despair about the future of democracy in this country would deepen, hard as that is to believe for some of you.

On the other hand, if you can, as you have in the past, continue to query your own belief system, I am confident that you will come to the conclusion that liberalism is far more congenial to your worldview than you currently think. You may be remain seriously bugged by my particular brand of liberalism, but those kinds of disagreements are part and parcel of the liberal tradition. No genuine liberal ever wants lockstep agreement. That’s for Republicans.

There is, however, a disagreement in kind between arguments within liberalism and those intended to destroy it. There are very few of those that stand on their own merit, without positing a dependence upon an unseen Authority or an innate permanent inequality between people that deserves to be codified into law. Liberals emphatically reject arguments that categorically depend upon such assumptions; it is there our tolerance meets its limit. And a Democratic Party that moves further to embrace such assumptions would be a terrible party, indeed.

*Many dishonest critics of liberals assume that our interest in understanding what Islamism is about represents a desire to “engage’ radical Islamists in an argument over values during a shared meal of hummus, red wine, and brie. They know very well that is a lie. Unfortunately, many other people, who understand nothing about liberal values of inquiry and knowledge, believe the lie.

BlogGods

by digby

I’ve got a post up this afternoon over at FDL in which I suck up shamelessly to just about everyone in the blogosphere, especially you readers. But I really mean it.

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Meet The New Cokie

by digby

I got in a lot of trouble a few weeks ago for being disrespectful toward Ana Marie Cox. I have no intention of being disrespectful now. I think it’s just terrific that she’s become a full fledged member of the mainstream media and is covering bloggers as if they are pod people from mars. It’s the smart career move. Still, it’s quite a transition since for several years she represented the liberal blogosphere on countless blogging panels and media appearances. It’s a testament to her faking skills that she could convincingly be a blogging pioneer one minute and a befuddled mainstream journalist the next. It’s trailblazing, actually.

This article, which has been promised as the first of an exciting series on the YKOS convention is not illuminating in any way. It could have been written by Adam Nagourney. In fact, Adam Nagourney wrote the first draft.

Cox, being unfamiliar with flamethrowing blogging as she is, appears to be shocked to hear something like this:

One journalist presses some workshop attendees on the apparent disconnect between the online bomb- throwers and the chatty, eager conference goers. A woman explains that one would never attack someone in person the way you can online: “It’s the difference between bombing someone from 50,000 feet and sticking a bayonet between their eyes.” And most people, she observes, can’t deal with sticking a bayonet between the eyes. “Unless you’re really psychopathic.”

As a mainstream journalist now, it would imappropriate for her to offer any insights into the hyperbolic nature of blogging, despite her own contribution to the genre. That would be wrong. Instead, she just lets it hang out there as an example of the way the bloodthirsty left blogosphere thinks, even referring to the attendees sarcastically as “cordial” (and drunk) in the next paragraph. TIME must have been pleased.

TBOGG reports that Instapundit was very pleased when Cox sent him this private email which he posted on his blog:

“Bonus material: I saw Joe Wilson get not one but two standing ovations today; he was also called ‘a true American hero.’ People waited in line for his autograph. I’m going to begin drinking now.”

Can a Regnery special be far in the future? That’s the predictable move for her.

In the meantime, she throws her lot in with her new MSM pals explicitly when she writes:

A gaggle of mainstream media reporters in the back grows nervous. “Are you worried they’re going to blog us?” I ask someone. He replies, “I’m worried they’re going to lynch us.”

“Are you worried they’re going to blog us?”

I’m not sure what that means. I can only assume it bears some relationship to assfucking — Anna Marie’s special contribution to blogospheric discourse. Perhaps she’ll write about how one can parlay a blog about anal sex into a gig at the kewl kidz table in the next installment. It stands to reason that it’s that kind of “insider” insights for which TIME magazine signed her for this gig. If they wanted Cokie Roberts they would have hired Cokie Roberts.

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Ligeti

Gyorgy Ligeti died today after a long period of declining health. I’m at a complete loss for words, he was one of the great composers of our time but that doesn’t begin to describe him. More sometime later, maybe. Right now is a time to listen and listen and listen.

Fashionable Babbling

by digby

Following up tristero’s Dear Joe letter below, here’s Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution:

For years Peter “Pe-Nart” Beinart has attempted to speak in complete gibberish. And he’s gotten close—70% gibberish, 86% gibberish, 93% gibberish. But it’s only in a recent Q & A with Kevin Drum about Beinart’s book The Good Fight that he’s reached his goal of 100% (reg. req.):

Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries.

This is outstanding work. The only way his point could be improved would be to put it like this:

Gerbil narcolepsy sofa-bed detritus squanders Bigfoot. Crapulent snurf machine? Crapulent snurf machine knob knobbler! Groucho lithe koala traipsing noreaster flange mucus. Mithril acne fluffernutter shamus fling-ding-a-ling-doo!

Seriously: in what sense can jihadism be said to “sit at the center” of global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion? In what possible way can these all be claimed to be greater threats to the U.S. than to other countries?

You may wonder, then, why Beinart’s saying something so blatantly absurd. The answer is that the “liberalism” he espouses is incoherent. The Cheney platform—Let’s Rule The World By Hate And Fear—at least has an undeniable internal logic. So too does a radical evaluation of U.S. foreign policy. They both tell coherent stories. But the mushy tale “I, Peter Beinart, will run the planet except I’ll be nice” simply doesn’t make sense. Thus he doesn’t have any alternative to saying preposterous things.

What’s this talk about incoherent gibberish? We’re at war! I know some say that terrorism isn’t responsible for global warming. I disagree. We’re fightin’ evil. Global warmin’ is evil and America is good. Like that bird flu thing. It’s anti-American. It harbors terrists. We’re gonna have tah bring it tah justice. Financial contagion? Unless we repeal the death tax the terrists will’ve won. Everybody knows that.

Thank the good lord for reasonable liberals like Peter Beinert, that’s all I can say. At least he understands that there has never been a threat like terrorism in the whole history of the world and unless we stop them, they are going to take over the planet and eat our children with a knife and fork! And that’s after they take all our money and give us sunburns with their secret global warming death ray.

What’s incoherent about that?

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Left Behind: Eternal Forces

by tristero

In the desperate and probably futile strategy to embarass the manufacturers into withdrawing this sick product from the market, I am happy to add to the free hype Atrios and troutfishing are providing for the soon-to-be-released Left Behind: Eternal Forces. Perhaps the imminent release under a well-known christianist brand name of a videogame in which people are either converted or killed will focus minds on what these people people are up to.

What is important to remember is that we’re not talking here about the insane Phelps marketing a cheap knockoff, someone the right is happy to disown. Nope, the perpetrators of Left Behind: Eternal Forces are part of the network of established goto guys for commentary on religion in the mainstream media, and the gang behind the anti-family Constitutional amendment, and so much other crap. These are among the people who talk to the leaders of the House, leaders of the Senate, and to the president of the United States on a regular basis. They are not outliers in terms of power. But the videogame makes it clear how fanatical they are. The so-called “Christian” Right is eliminationist, anti-American, intolerant, and far removed from the mainstream of religious belief in this country.

Equally important: There is nothing about the worldview of this videogame that cannot be found in the writings and speeches of political operatives like Dobson, LaHaye, Robertson, Falwell, Rushdoony, and others in their milieu (here’s a paean to intolerance co-authored by James Dobson’s son. ). The particular balance of extremist positions varies to some extent among all these people, but the overall thrust is clear: they advocate replacement of a democratic American republic with a theocracy (Christian Nation)and the conversion or elimination of all non-believers.* The craziest of them – eg Rushdoony – are not merely cynical dirtbags trying to snatch every last nickel they can from ignorant rubes. The worst of them actually believe this stuff. But here’s the rub: even the less worse are willing to listen to the worse, and prominent politicians today are are also listening.

It is the very same immoral scum who can’t decide whether or not to release an obscenity like Left Behind:Eternal Forces who are succeeding in passing laws to eliminate the right of the poor to receive decent medical care instead of a coat hanger. They are the same folks trying to ban the purchase of contraceptive devices and sex toys. These are the same people who would deny a child a safe, effective vaccination against cancer because it conflicts with their “beliefs.” These are the same people who are also the main funders and strategists backing “intelligent design” creationism. These are the same people trying to rewrite the American Constitution for the 21st century so it celebrates bigotry. Finally:

These are the people without whose support the Republican Party believes it would never win an election.

*Oh sure, it’s hard to find Dobson saying in public that come the revolution, let’s kill all the Jews, scientists, and atheists (I have no idea what he says in private). Occasionally, though sometimes one of them slips a little and lets loose a torrent of xenophobia, racism, and/or anti-semitism (remember Saint Billy Graham to Richard Nixon), or recommends the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as good history, yet still receives fawning coverage by the New York Times. Even so, just a little bit of digging turns up death threats and kill lists against doctors who don’t subscribe to extremist theology (see the so-called “Nuremberg Files.” Similar sites exist today, for example the one currently at http://forerunner.com/fyi/killer/index.html). A little more digging exposes discussions which hold a woman guilty of accessory to murder if she has an abortion, no punishment specified but the death penalty ominously hovers over the discussion (this ideo being so psychotic and cruel, it’s one the mainstreamers don’t mention too often, like banning rubbers). Tying this level of rhetoric directly to the famous extremists like Falwell or Dobson is all but impossible, but this is the milieu they inhabit. They know these guys, and they listen to them.

Dear Joe Klein

by tristero

In your effusively positive review of Peter Beinart’s latest typing, you write:

This is not to say Beinart has always been right. He supported the war in Iraq — for two reasons, he writes. He wanted to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons, which was reasonable. He also hoped the American-led invasion might produce an admirable democratic government in Iraq, which was not. “On both counts, I was wrong,” he writes. “It is a grim irony that this book’s central argument is one I myself ignored when it was needed most.”

Beinart’s humility is charming, but unfair to himself. The argument at the heart of “The Good Fight” is a product of intellectual growth. It evolved as Beinart watched the disaster unfold in Iraq; it is the result of a rigorous search for principles that might guide the United States as it confronts the challenge of Islamist totalitarianism and the other viral threats of the Information Age.

I have a problem with this, Joe. Y’see, for this liberal, the public space is not first and foremost a sandbox for drooling kids. It’s a place for the intellectually grown. You seem to forget that people died to advance Beinart’s, Remnick’s, and Packer’s (to name just three) intellectual development. Thousands upon thousands of them.

Am I actually saying that Beinart, et al nurtured their intellectual growth in a soil they fertilized with countless litres of innocent human blood? Yes, Joe, that is exactly what I am saying. But this isn’t a bad horror film. They really were, despite all their pretenses to worldliness and wisdom, naive and stupid. And to this day, those who were neither cannot find regular purchase anywhere in the mainstream American discourse.

Being intellectually mature does not equal Bush-style mental sclerosis. Indeed, many of us have grown intellectually in the past five years. Krugman has changed dramatically, for example.

But here’s the thing: we were already intellectually mature to begin with. Beinart wasn’t. And based on the attitudes you describe in the review, he’s still in short pants. And if ever there was a time to hear from the grown-ups, that time is now.

Love,

tristero

Catblog Sunday

by digby

I don’t usually do catblogging, even though I am a cat person, because I take terrible pictures and others do a much better job of it than I would. But I can’t pass up this story.

Meet Jack:

Look what Jack did:

WEST MILFORD, N.J. – A black bear picked the wrong New Jersey yard for a jaunt earlier this week, running into a territorial tabby who ran the furry beast up a tree — twice.

Jack, a 15-pound orange-and-white cat, keeps a close vigil on his property, chasing small animals when he can, but his owners and neighbors say his latest escapade was surprising.

“We used to joke, ‘Jack’s on duty,’ never knowing he’d go after a bear,” cat owner Donna Dickey told The Star-Ledger of Newark for Friday’s newspapers.

Neighbor Suzanne Giovanetti first spotted Jack’s accomplishment after her husband saw a bear climb a tree on the edge of their northern New Jersey home’s back yard on Sunday. Giovanetti thought Jack was simply looking up at the bear, but soon realized the much larger animal was afraid of the hissing cat.

After about 15 minutes peering down at the cat from the tree, the bear descended and tried to run away, only to have Jack chase it up another tree.

At this point Dickey, who feared for her cat, called Jack back home and the bear scurried back to the woods.

“He doesn’t want anybody in his yard,” Dickey said.

They’re like that.

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Death Star Strategery

by digby

So Newtie’s getting serious about running. And he’s going to be running as the kinder, gentler, smarter GOP. I kid you not. Of course, he’s as insulting as ever:

When Americans look at the current roster of Republican and Democratic leaders, Gingrich said, they face an unappealing dilemma.

“We have a choice between those who are failing to deliver and those who are unthinkable,” he said, adding that he would put “even money” on the Democrats taking back the House this fall. “Neither party currently is where the country is.”

President Gingrich? Unthinkable, all right.

There’s a lot in this article to guffaw over and I’ll leave it up to you to enjoy it on your own. I have to mention this one little part though, because I’ve written extensively about this subject and Newtie and I honestly can’t believe he’s still pushing the idea. It should disqualify him (among many other things) from ever holding any office again:

Gingrich also questioned some of the administration’s tactics, noting that he had warned the White House privately in the fall of 2002 to put only a small force on the ground in Iraq and move quickly to install Iraqis in power. Given the current situation, however, he said the United States can take just one course of action in Iraq: “Grind it out.”

Newt was for the original Rumsfeld plan which was to put about 40,000 troops on the ground and install Ahmad Chalabi as the puppet president of Iraq. He is nuts on this RMA (revolution in military affairs) bullshit and always has been.

…their [old] answer has been to design campaign plans that are so massive – I mean the standard plan in Afghanistan was either Tomahawks or 5 divisions, and that’s why Rumsfeld was so important. Cause Rumsfeld sat down and said, “Well what if we do this other thing? You know, 3 guys on horseback, a B-2 overhead.” And it was a huge shock to the army. I mean, because it worked. Now I’ll tell you one guy who does agree and that’s Chuck Horner who ran the air campaign.

You can still find people out there who are warriors who came up during the Reagan years, all of whom will say flatly to the Secretary of Defense, “The right model is simultaneous, massive, immediate combined air and land forces, period.”

And there’s this:

Gingrich, who also is a member of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory panel, said he was confident that General Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, would not be swayed by suggestions that he include more reinforcements and plan a more cautious attack.
He said that Franks, an army general, “will probably have a more integrated, more aggressive and more risk-taking plan.”

“If the chiefs wanted to be extremely cautious, extremely conservative and design a risk-avoiding strategy, that would be nothing new,” he said in an interview.

This guy takes himself very seriously as a military historian and strategist. He also likes dinosaurs. In other words, he’s a twelve year old geek who wants to play with real soldiers. Like many wingnut “intellectuals” he seems to have some serious developmental problems.

Admittedly, I am no military strategist. But I read up on Rummy and Newtie’s RMA back in 2002, and while it is not entirely bullshit, this particular aspect of it certainly is, especially in the hands of people who simply refuse to accept reality. In Newtie’s little fantasy Iraq, perhaps using even fewer troops than we did could have worked. Here on planet earth, the results of sending in too few as it was are manifest and horrifying.

In this article at Antiwar.com called “Off With His Head” William S. Lind discusses the fallacy of Rumsfeldian “transformation:”

While Rumsfeldian “Transformation” represents change, it represents change in the wrong direction. Instead of attempting to move from the Second Generation to the Third (much less the Fourth), Transformation retains the Second Generation’s conception of war as putting firepower on targets while trying to replace people with technology. Its summa is the Death Star, where men and women in spiffy uniforms sit in air-conditioned comfort zapping enemies like bugs. It is a vision of future war that appeals to technocrats and lines industry pockets, but has no connection to reality. The combination of this vision of war with an equally unrealistic vision of strategic objectives has given us the defeat in Iraq. Again, Rumsfeld lies at the heart of both.

And his little dog Newt too, who served on the Defense Policy board with Richard Perle and the rest and advised Rummy every step of the way. Gingrich may not be the only one who refuses to see reality on this. But he’s one of the most flamoyantly “optimistic” about this transformation after our massive tactical and strategic blunder in Iraq. He still believes that we could have “taken” Iraq with a cell phone and a couple of special forces guys on camels. That is nothing short of delusional.

I doubt that he can win. He’s an iconic figure of loathing in American politics. (I think the Dickensian name alone disqualifies him.) But you never know. The American people elected Nixon twice.

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